Officially, 17-year-old Joshua Oakes Churchwell’s death isn’t being investigated as a homicide — it’s classified as a death investigation.
That’s the case even though two boys found Josh’s body curled in a fetal position inside a 20-by-29 inch suitcase that was only 11 inches deep in a trash-strewn vacant lot on April 1, 2011.
“He didn’t put himself into that suitcase,” said Bob Churchwell, Joshua’s adoptive father. “Somebody had to have put him there. There is someone out there who knows something. We just hope and pray their conscience will get to them and they will go to police and share what they know with them.”
Josh’s death wasn’t ruled a homicide because Dr. Joseph White, who performed the autopsy, formally categorized the cause and manner of death as “undetermined.”
That decision in turn determined how the case was handled. For example, the Denver police department does not include Joshua’s case on its cold-case homicide list.
Even so, Doug Schepman said detectives have continued to investigate leads in the case when they come up.
Despite not ruling Joshua’s death a homicide, the coroner saw evidence it was not likely a case where someone died in an accident, of a drug overdose or by natural causes.
“Given the suspicious circumstances in which the body was discovered, a natural death, while certainly still theoretically possible, is unlikely,” White wrote in his autopsy report.
It’s possible the death was caused by asphyxiation, which leaves subtle or even no physical findings that could have been even more difficult to observe due to the decomposed condition of the body, according to the coroner’s report.
It’s also possible an unmeasured toxic substance caused the teen’s death even though toxicology tests seemed to rule out an overdose. Aside from traces of nicotine and gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, a party drug commonly known as GHB that is also naturally produced in the body, Joshua’s system showed no signs of harmful substances, according to an article by Denver Post reporter Tom McGhee.
Joshua was attending Ridge View Academy, a school for children in the correctional system, when he slipped away during a wrestling match at East High School in Denver and ran away. His body was found 12 weeks later.
A key possible witness, Anthony Ricardo Ford, 18, fled with Joshua, Churchwell said.
Police told Churchwell that a third person picked up the teens and drove them to the Ruby Hill Park area of Denver, where Joshua’s body was later found.
Ford knew something about the teen’s death, but his father stopped police midway through an interview and they didn’t learn enough to solve the case, Churchwell said.
Churchwell thinks an incident at Ridge View before his son’s death may have caused it.
Joshua’s three roommates fashioned crude knives and practiced thrusting them into the undersides of their mattresses. Concerned that their actions could affect his upcoming release, Joshua warned them to get rid of the blades within two weeks or he would turn them in, Churchwell said. When the other boys refused, he reported them and detention officials confiscated the shanks.
Churchwell believes Joshua’s escape from Ridge View may have been engineered so someone could take revenge. “There is always the concern that somebody set him up to where Josh would get out on the streets of Denver and then these kids took retribution,” he said.
Two years after Churchwell died, Ford died shortly after he was released from the Adams County Jail.
But Churchwell said he believes Ford isn’t the only one who knew what happened to Josh.
Anyone with information that could help solve this case is asked to call Denver Crime Stoppers at 720-913-2000.
